John Muir The Last Explorers

A little more than 150 years ago, a young man arrived here

in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in California.

He was far from the first person to walk these hills and valleys,

but he was an explorer all the same.

And one day he would be remembered with more reverence

than most of America's presidents.

He stood beneath the giant sequoia trees

and experienced a kind of religious conversion...in reverse.

His name was John Muir

and what he learnt here would change forever

our understanding of nature.

John Muir was one of a small group of explorers

who took to the stage as the great age of exploration was drawing to a close.

Many before them sought adventure and fortune,

staked claims to vast territories in the name of God and country.

But the last explorers didn't plant flags, they planted ideas.

Ideas that helped shape

the modern world we know today.

It's 1st September 1867. You're 29 years old.

You came here from Scotland at the age of 11,

and you're about to begin your career as an explorer

by walking 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico,

from where you will sail to South America and its jungles.

Now, what do you take on such a journey?

Well,

if you're John Muir,

you take a little bit of money - in God we trust -

in a secret pocket.

You take a compass and a bar of soap and a towel,

and you pack that in a bag. You take some reading material.

But what do you take?

Well, John Muir takes The Poems Of Robert Burns,

good Scot that he was.

He takes an Englishman's Paradise Lost.

Of course, he takes The New Testament.

Because no matter how far you travel, if you're John Muir,

you never quite get away from this.

And you also take...a textbook about botany.

And that's it.

It's bordering on madness.

What sort of man makes such little preparation for such a journey?

What sort of man becomes the patron saint of national parks?

An idea that has spread around the world, that there should be places

set aside for all time, free from private ownership,

accessible to every citizen,

where people can experience nature and beauty.

Muir began his journey in Indianapolis.

He rarely asked directions,

navigated his way through cities with his compass in hand,

and never spoke to a single soul.

It was more like an escape than an expedition.

John Muir was running away from his entire life.

Six months before, he'd been an industrial inventor

with a job in a factory,

driven by a brand of Christianity that was poisonously grim.

An industrial accident ended all that.

What he was doing was setting in a new circular saw,

and he had taken a leather belt which had been attached to

much of the rest of the machinery, and the belt after running

for a few hours had loosened up and it needed to be shortened.

Well, he made use of a nail-like end of a file to pry out

the stitches of that belt and, in the attempt to pry it, it slipped,

pierced his right eye, and in a few moments the aqueous humour,

-the watery substance of the eye, had dripped out on his hand.

-Oh, how horrifying.

The sight failed, um...and he walked well enough to the house where he was boarding,

but in a few hours the shock sent the other eye into blindness as well.

-Right.

-And he was in total permanent blindness for several months.

As soon as he got out into heaven's light,

he made sure that whatever fate would befall him, light or dark,

he was going to see as much of creation as he possibly could.

The recovery of his sight triggered the 1,000-mile walk,

which took him from Indianapolis through the Cumberland Mountains

to the rivers of Georgia,

and from Georgia down through Florida towards the sea.

And in the course of doing that,

the revelations seemed to come thick and fast,

He said... Well, in his journal,

that whole kingdoms of creatures had enjoyed existence and returned to dust

long before man appeared to claim them, and that, you know,

frankly after humans had played our part in creation's plan

we too could disappear without any extraordinary commotion whatsoever.

He had clearly come to a view that every creature on the planet

was as worthy as any other, and that man had no special place

in the ecosystem, simply a place that was exalted enough

to have a great deal of responsibility attached to it.

Muir's Christianity was melting.

Everything he'd learned over his father's knee.

Daniel Muir had dragged the family to America,

leaving behind a successful business selling animal feed and grain.

Convinced that the town he left behind, Dunbar,

was a den of depravity and sin, and that America's solitudes

would be better for the contemplation of his wrathful god.

But on his solitary walk, John Muir came to believe

that God cared no more for man than he did for alligators.

Muir reached the Gulf of Mexico and caught malaria.

Suddenly South America seemed impractical. It was America,

and his own new ideas, that needed exploring.

He would go to California instead, to visit Yosemite,

a valley so beautiful that it had been placed under state protection four years before.

He reached the foothills of the Californian Sierra Nevada range

in the summer of 1868.

He found work herding sheep,

and the higher he went, the happier he became.

We can easily understand the impact that this place

would have had on John Muir.

It was a more magnificent, a more wonderful landscape

than anything he had ever seen.

And everywhere he looked

he would have seen sights that humbled him and raised him up.

And then in the June, he saw the mountains above Yosemite Valley

for the very first time, and it was then that the last

of his father's horror stories of damnation finally fell away.

John Muir hadn't been to church since he'd left Indianapolis.

The valley of Yosemite became his church instead.

Here was an altogether different kind of eternity.

There were no choirs of angels, no unending fires.

The god who made all this wasn't angry.

He wasn't even especially interested in humankind.

There was nothing here his father could understand, or ruin.

He was free. It had taken him 30 years.

Muir took a job running a sawmill for the owner of the valley's hotel.

With his industrial background he was absurdly overqualified.

But the job made staying here possible.

He built himself a cabin near the sawmill

and let the mill stream run through it.

He liked the sound of the water and in his spare time, he explored.

Thank God I'm wearing my lucky socks.

'John Muir climbed anything and everything he could

'to see what was up there.

'And if I want to try and understand him better, I need to do likewise.

'But I've never climbed anything more complicated than a ladder.

'Guide climber Dave Lane is giving me a last-minute briefing in the basics.'

So these are called cams, nuts or stoppers, slings,

cordelettes, carabiners. Right?

'But it's kind of hard to pay attention

'because above my head is 700 feet of the charmingly named

'Manure Pile Buttress, one of Yosemite Valley's easier climbs.

'At least they SAY it's easy.'

That tree...

All right, Neil, you're on belay, you can climb when you're ready.

-Climbing, Dave.

-OK, climb on.

'John Muir usually climbed alone in hobnailed boots,

'thought rope was for cissies, and didn't approve of people

'hammering anything into cliffs that they could tie ropes onto.

'You are joking?!'

So here's the first tricky part.

This is where we'll look for some feet. Good handhold right here.

Just remember to stand up straight,

and use your feet through this section.

See this big flake sticking out?

-OK.

-You might not be able to see it from there.

-I can't see it from here.

You just want to come right over to this thing.

'Dave makes it look easy. I think I hate him!'

-OK, Neil, you're on belay.

-On belay.

'And now it's my turn.'

-Climbing, Dave.

-OK, climb on.

-Enjoy it.

-Ha!

You just want to go straight sideways to your left.

Uh-huh.

Remember it's about your feet, so sometimes taking smaller steps

works better than taking those big, giant ones.

Pushing out from the rock...

There you go.

Nice work.

Your buddy, John Muir, would've been looking to come up the easy way too

-on these sorts of things.

-Yeah.

'What does he mean, "easy"?'

Just go straight up from right there.

Uh-huh.

They do this for fun, you know!

I'm fighting for my life here.

'Schooled by nothing more than enthusiasm and hard-won experience,

'Muir became one of America's leading mountaineers.

'Later, he would make the first recorded ascent of Mount Ritter,

'a peak over 13,000 feet high in the middle of the Sierra Nevada.

'Near the top, as he inched up a cliff face

'where the holds were tiny, he froze.

'"I was suddenly brought to a dead stop," 'he wrote,

"with arms outspread, clinging close

'"to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down.

'"My doom appeared fixed. I must fall."

'His mind, he recalled, seemed to fill with a stifling smoke.

'This reminds me powerfully of me, right now.'

Oh, this is murder.

Wow.

Good work.

I can't quite see John Muir up here in his hobnailed boots,

but you never know.

Visionary madmen get everywhere.

-Check out the water blowing up.

-I know, I know. It's awe-inspiring.

-Let's you know how windy it is up there, huh?

-Yeah.

-Crazy.

-Do you want to go the easy way or the hard way?

-Easy way.

-OK!

Right, here we go. Last pitch.

This'll be the one that gets me.

It's one of the biggest rock monoliths in the world.

Did you come up here, John?

Is any of this polish yours?

I hope so.

I hope so.

HE GRUNTS

My handgrip...and my foothold.

Right.

HE GASPS

-Nice job.

-Thanks, Dave.

I'm so glad to be here. You know the way you drive to work sometimes

and you get there and you can't even remember how you did it?

You can't remember driving. Well, on there, every single second

is very clear and it really reminds you that you're here right now.

So if there was just a little bit of that in the appeal of doing this

for John Muir, then I understand just a tiny little bit,

tiny little bit, of what he was about.

That and the view, of course.

The valley was only seven miles long.

But it held so much drama.

The floor was flat and fertile.

The walls blasted upwards.

Waterfalls, fed by the snowmelt every spring, poured down them.

At one end of the valley stood El Capitan,

over 3,000 feet of sheer granite.

The far end of the valley was dominated by Half Dome.

Muir was drunk on the sheer spectacle.

There was no-one to spoil this second childhood.

No-one to stop him devoting his days to nature.

No-one to stop him throwing himself into it.

The valley's waterfalls were particularly tempting.

The largest were the Yosemite Falls.

The waters fell 2,500 feet in total.

He climbed by day and by night just to see them.

One night, he went a little bit further.

Halfway up the falls, on Fern Ledge, he had the insane idea

that if he could get behind the falls,

then he might catch a glimpse of the moon

through the falling water.

What he did was wait until the wind changed direction,

so that it was pushing most of the water away from the cliff face,

and then he nipped in behind it and he was delighted by what he saw.

Sure enough, he could see the moon through that cascade.

But of course, the wind changed direction again,

pushing the waterfall back onto the rock face,

and suddenly he was being bombarded with 1,500 foot of water.

He was in real danger of being swept off to his death,

but somehow he managed to brace himself against some rocks

so that he could stay in position

until he was able to crawl out to safety.

He was putting himself in real jeopardy, wasn't he?

He never thought about his own personal safety.

He would be a ranger's worst nightmare for a backpacker.

There was this manic sort of desire, this inexorable kind of urge,

he just could not stop moving deeper into this.

But he looked forward to losing himself into these environments,

he took risks, incredible risks, and he got away with it

time and time again. I don't know, but it's amazing to me

-that he made it to the age that he did doing what he did.

-Plenty of fresh air.

Plenty of fresh air, and he certainly had a lot of exercise.

How did Muir go about the business of understanding this place?

I think the mountains were his teacher.

Every day that he went out into the Sierra,

every night when he was in the Sierra, it was not just a communion,

but a lesson that was being learned

and the teacher was the Sierra itself.

When he looked out on the Sierra Nevada he saw, to some degree,

he saw the cosmos, you know, a microcosm of the universe right here,

he saw a universe of granite, and he recognised to some degree

that this granite was not necessarily

-the way it's always been.

-So he saw the constant change?

That's right. The constancy of change that's happening right now

as we're talking. There's something here that says,

"It has happened, it's happening now, and it will happen."

It's as if all the tenses are here at the same time,

moving with the wind around us.

Ultimately, what role does Muir give to humankind in all of this?

He saw that human beings were a part of it.

They weren't at the centre of it, they were a part of it,

and he didn't see any diminishment. He actually saw the opposite.

I think Muir had this recognition

that there was no shame in being such a small part of creation,

that all those parts add up to creation itself.

"I have died and gone to heaven," he wrote in one letter.

The letter was to Jeanne Carr,

the wife of his old university professor Ezra Carr.

Ezra had taught him chemistry and natural science.

Jeanne had shown him the writings of other Americans who loved nature.

Their ideas had lain dormant within him then,

but now he was free of conventional Christianity.

Muir would always treasure his relationship with Jeanne.

From Yosemite, he sent her letter after letter,

delighted by the valley's plant life and its trees.

In particular, by the giant sequoias.

He drank the sap.

He was stunned by the sheer size.

Wrote to Jeanne Carr, "The king tree and me have sworn eternal love.

"I wish I was so drunk and sequoical

"that I could preach the green-brown woods to all the juiceless world,

"descending from this divine wilderness like a John Baptist."

Muir was also in awe of their great age.

Some of these trees might be 2,000, 3,000, even 4,000 years old,

as old, indeed, as the world itself,

for those believed in the literal truth of the book of Genesis.

But Muir no longer believed.

In his mind, the years began to stack up.

Tens, hundreds, thousands,

even millions of years.

This was Muir's first tantalising glimpse into deep time.

Soon afterwards, he was introduced to an idea

that fascinated him still more.

The idea that valleys like Yosemite had been made by ice.

Glaciers had slowly gouged out the deep U-shape in the rock.

Most of America's scientific establishment still believed

that only earthquakes could have made Yosemite.

But glaciers made perfect sense to Muir.

They explained what had happened to the rest of Half Dome.

They explained why the sides of the valley

were often so flat and polished.

He wrote to Jeanne Carr,

"The grandeur of these forces

"and their glorious results overpower me.

"In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing."

Glaciers obsessed him.

He gave up his job at the sawmill shortly afterwards

and went into the hills and mountains, chasing glaciers.

His explorations took him far from the valley itself.

His kit was, as always, minimal.

No gun, no blankets -

in the end, he even dispensed with his overcoat

because it got in the way.

During the day, he'd collect scraps of wood

and at night he'd make a fire with that and sleep beside it,

with no other protection amongst the ice sheets

and snowfields of the High Sierra.

In October of 1871, he found a living glacier

at the valley's eastern end.

The article he wrote for a New York paper,

showing how glaciers had made Yosemite, was his first publication,

proof that his love of nature was becoming a career.

He sent copies to his family.

His father replied, "Come back to the Church and God's holy word.

"Leave glaciers and nature behind.

"Burn your writings

"so that they will do no more harm to you or others."

Nothing would dilute his father's fundamentalist Christianity.

While to Muir's mind, there were only two real sins left -

desecration of this beauty and indifference to it.

In the winter of 1873, Muir left his beloved Yosemite.

He moved to Oakland, just across the water from San Francisco.

He was on a mission. He had something to preach.

He was like a John Baptist with a message for the juiceless world.

And his message was,

"There is more to America than its towns and cities."

Muir would urge his fellow Americans to escape, as he had.

He wrote for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin,

producing pieces such as

John Muir's Description Of A Wonderful Region,

John Muir Gives Some Curious Facts About Sierra Snow,

John Muir Shakes The Dust Off His Feet And Flees To The Mountains.

Way to go with the snappy titles, John(!)

Muir was offering his readers a new understanding of nature,

preaching a new America that he had found by re-exploring Yosemite.

Nature had saved his soul.

He wanted his fellow Americans to share the blessing.

He was preaching against what San Francisco,

and all of urban America,

had come to stand for.

The galloping, breakneck, unrestrained pursuit

of cold, hard cash.

He wrote in the present tense.

Not the tense of cities, in which buildings rise and fall

and people are born and die every second.

The tense of landscape.

A long now of almost unchanging Sierra horizons.

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

"Nature's peace will flow into you as the sunshine into the trees.

"The winds will blow their freshness into you,

"and the storms their energy,

"while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

In 1875, he published his first article

for Harper's New Monthly Magazine,

which was circulated throughout the entire nation.

Others followed.

His ideas struck a chord. He was changing America's mind.

He was in demand. Famous. No longer a voice in the wilderness.

But he continued to visit the wilderness every year

to recharge the voice.

Muir's wilderness trip of 1875

was devoted to a survey of his beloved sequoias

throughout the Sierra Nevada range.

He found them in abundance.

Yeah, these big boys, they're the real forest.

All these other firs are just...

..passers-by.

It's these sequoias that are the witnesses, big sentinels.

And here comes a pair of identical twins

and their big brother on the other side of the track.

Wow! Fantastic!

Oh, I think it's got a name as well.

Oliver Twist! It's my tree!

But his sequoias were under threat.

A tree as tall as Oliver Twist was irresistible to lumber merchants.

The economies of scale are blindingly obvious.

As for me, it's time to face an inconvenient truth.

I've come here to speak to Jim Spickler,

who knows all about sequoias.

And people who know all about sequoias can often be found up them,

hanging from what feels worryingly like string.

Are you comfortable?

-Eh...you know.

-Do this.

Sit back with this, take your thumbs

and pull those leg straps a little bit down, it'll make you...

-I don't want to do that.

-OK.

LAUGHTER

So, Jim, tell me, what is it about the sequoia tree?

Why are they so big?

Ah. Well, part of the reason they're so big

is they're just extremely old.

This particular tree may be 3,000 years old.

-So is the species millions of years old?

-I would say it is.

So you might have had dinosaurs

strolling past sequoias from time to time?

Sure. Yeah. It's quite possible.

When Muir arrived here,

were there logging companies felling the sequoias?

They were. And you know, he came around, it was about 1875,

and he saw what was going on, he saw these companies

just taking these trees with no real regulation,

so he wrote some letters to local politicians,

he also went to Congress.

He tried to get the word out,

he tried to let people know that this was a species in danger.

If we didn't slow down,

if we didn't really consider what we were doing,

we might lose this incredible species.

And that is part of the reason why we still have about 60%

of the original primary forest left,

because John Muir fought for it.

He was so aware, wasn't he?

-He saw the bigger picture.

-He did.

He was an incredible man with a lot of foresight.

'That's what we in television call "a good out".

'I'm not waiting for permission. I'm going back down.'

Here I come!

'Jim's going to the top, 200 feet further up,

'for a few shots.'

It's survivable now, with minor fractures, I think!

I'm definitely going to live, even if it all goes wrong now!

A little bit of time in a wheelchair, maybe, I can cope!

'Here's what Jim shot at the top.

'And this is what I was doing at the same time!'

Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh, thank goodness for that!

Oh!

I'm done with tree-climbing.

Something had to be done to save the sequoias,

but Muir was incapable of rushing anything into print.

Writing was a painful chore.

In fact, it was becoming dangerously similar to the work

he kept advising Americans to stop doing.

But in February of 1876,

he published God's First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?

in which he sought not just to celebrate or explain nature,

but to defend it.

But despite Muir's enormous popularity,

there was no instant preservation movement.

It was lonely up here.

Muir had known Louie Strentzel for three or four years

by the time they got engaged.

Jeanne Carr had introduced them.

She was the only daughter of a successful fruit-grower

in the Alhambra Valley near San Francisco.

A wealthy man.

Louie made him happy. He'd been alone too long.

He was 42 when they married. She was 33.

But she didn't like travel.

He took her to Yosemite.

She was unimpressed.

He went to Alaska to see the glaciers -

she didn't come.

His father-in-law asked him to help run the fruit ranch

and Louie had babies.

And John Muir, very slowly, lost touch with his wilderness.

Wife, home, family - the stream of articles dried up.

Either he had nothing else to say, or no time in which to say it.

No more John Baptist preaching to the juiceless world.

He was working hard, growing fruit, and making money.

John Muir had gone native.

When John Muir became a fruit farmer,

he didn't just leave a gap in the market, he left a gaping void

in America's sense of self, which no-one else could really fill.

Other American writers had extolled the virtues and power of nature.

But none had done it so successfully,

none had so thoroughly captured the popular imagination.

For almost ten years, he focused all of his phenomenal energy

on providing for his family.

He loved them dearly, but the work dried him out.

He was as juiceless as the world.

He lost weight.

In the end, Louie released him.

"Go back to writing," she said. "Go back to nature."

And in 1889 he returned to Yosemite with a visitor from New York.

His companion edited The Century,

a magazine with a million regular readers.

Robert Underwood Johnson had travelled

all the way across America to try and end John Muir's silence.

He wanted more of Muir's writing,

more brakes to apply to America's materialism.

When they reached Yosemite, they were horrified to find that

California's so-called protection of the valley had allowed

ploughed fields, a new hotel, a saloon, and a pig farm.

They made camp.

And Johnson pitched. "Look at the valley."

It was supposed to have been under the protection of the State of California

since 1864, and now it was quite literally a pigsty.

"We need the nation to declare the mountains around it as a national park.

"And you, John Muir, are the only person who can make that demand."

18 years before, the American government had created the world's

first national park around the geological miracles of Yellowstone.

Yellowstone was a unique,

alien landscape centred on an ancient volcano.

Congress had decreed that no-one should be allowed to own it,

although some felt that this had been done merely to guarantee

one of America's largest railway companies a tourist destination.

"Now was the time," said Johnson, "to expand on this precedent."

Yosemite needed National Park status.

Muir agreed,

but said he was not the man to lead such a campaign.

Johnson pleaded for hours, but he went home empty-handed.

He sent Muir letters, conscience calls,

and carried on his campaign using articles by other writers.

The government responded by tabling a modest bill

reserving just 200 square miles around Yosemite.

And at last, Muir dragged himself to the writing table.

In the articles he finally sent to Johnson,

Muir gave the idea of a national park new meaning.

He told of his near disaster on Yosemite falls,

delighted in the story of one winter

when rain and snow made waterfalls throughout the Sierra Nevada.

"500 miles of flooded waterfalls chanting together," he wrote,

"what a psalm was that!"

Yosemite itself was a place of worship.

"No temple made with hands could compare with it

"and human hands were despoiling it," as he wrote.

Muir demanded the preservation of a place that should remain

grandly independent of humankind,

and proposed a national park surrounding the valley,

covering not 200, but 12,000 square miles.

Robert Underwood Johnson published the articles at the beginning of September.

And at the end of September, Congress passed a bill

which reflected Muir's demands in their entirety.

It was law the very next day.

More was to come. Muir published an article calling

once again for the protection of sequoias throughout the Sierra Nevada.

And this time the President responded by personally

proclaiming 13 million acres of land as forest reserves.

Thanks to Muir, preservation was now an established and accepted idea.

When a tree's as old as this one,

it's hard to be sure just how old it actually is.

But it's a strong possibility that when this tree was a sapling here,

the people of Britain were still using bronze axes.

Thanks to John Muir, the mountains, and meadows,

and lakes of Yosemite, the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada

would be untouchable forever after. Beyond the reach of industry.

Muir's children, and his children's children

would benefit from the right to visit these places,

these living things.

At Johnson's suggestion, Muir founded the Sierra Club

initially to watch over how the government ran its new parks

and reservations.

Muir was elected president for life of what is now the world's

largest grassroots environmentalist organisation.

Is there a direct line of descent from John Muir

to modern environmentalists?

Absolutely.

The thing which Muir provided, which is the backbone

of modern environmentalism is the sense of time.

The sense that we are part of long natural time,

and that we should look both backward and forward in time,

and not just be bound by what's happening right now.

And there is now an important difference, which is that Muir

was focused on the idea that if you took the best wild places

and protected them, that the system could work because things that

happened in cities wouldn't affect things which happened in Yosemite.

We now understand that's not true.

Pollution doesn't stop at urban boundaries,

global warming certainly doesn't stop,

but the fundamental

first principle of environmental thinking, which is long time -

think back, think forward - that comes in a direct line from Muir.

What do you think he wanted people to experience in a place like this?

I think he wanted people to experience...

the joy of being small.

The joy of having something larger they were a part of,

which in that era there was a technical term for it - awe.

The word "awe" was used in Muir's era to mean that sense that

you're very small compared to the works of God or nature,

but that's not a bad thing.

So Muir was bringing a new kind of religious spirit, and it was

the idea that the heart is most filled with joy when it is close to God,

and it is closest to God when it is aware of its smallness.

Despite his presidency of the Sierra Club,

Muir avoided public appearances.

His real pleasure remained the wilderness itself,

and his best work was on the page,

however hard he found it to write.

Muir called his study the scribble den. It was chaotic.

He compared the heaps of papers to terminal and lateral moraines -

the heaps of stones left by the passage of glaciers.

From this chaos, Muir struggled to extract a book - his first,

The Mountains Of California.

He finished it in 1894.

Muir was careful to intercut the passages of hard science

on the role of glaciers with more seductive passages.

Such as the occasion when a windstorm enticed him

to climb a tree just to see how it felt.

"Perfectly safe," he assured his readers,

because the Douglas fir he had chosen was deeply rooted.

From 100 feet in the air, he enjoyed

the profound bass of the naked branches booming like waterfalls,

the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now a murmur,

now rising to a shrill whistling hiss,

now falling to a silky murmur.

"I kept my lofty perch for hours,

"frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself,

"or to feast on the delicious fragrances streaming past."

It was madness, majesty and geological insight all combined,

and it was a bestseller.

Muir wrote his second book, Our National Parks,

to underline their untouchability.

And once it was published, it became hard to tell John Muir

and the national parks apart.

Even though the idea of national parks wasn't his,

he presided over them.

He was their guardian. He was the spirit of the wilderness.

And in 1903, it became clear that one American in particular

felt he might benefit from close association with Muir's aura -

the President himself, Teddy Roosevelt.

It was time for another campfire conversation.

Roosevelt was seeking re-election.

The people saw him as a man who loved the outdoor life.

To be honest, they saw him as someone who loved shooting it.

He wanted to be seen as someone who actively cared for America's wild places.

So he set aside three days to camp with John Muir.

Photo-opportunities included.

When Roosevelt finally left, Muir was deeply impressed.

He felt that he'd met a man who was sincere in his love of nature.

Roosevelt had even promised to help reclaim the valley floor

from the slipshod management of the State of California.

The election of 1904 is the only one in which

we can be absolutely sure Muir actually cast a vote.

And he cast it for Theodore Roosevelt.

It seemed he'd backed the right man. After his re-election,

Roosevelt created 230,000,000 acres of national parks.

He created 18 national monuments too.

Reclassified landmarks such as the Grand Canyon

as monuments to American life and history.

And in 1905, as promised,

the valley floor in Yosemite was placed under federal control.

But in the same year, he took the forest reserves

and placed them under the control of the Department of Agriculture.

Agriculture? Did Roosevelt want to farm the forest reserves?

Muir grew nervous. Perhaps some of his national parks

were about to be found not just beautiful, but useful too.

1905 was a bad year.

It took away his wife. Louie died of stomach cancer.

And while he was still mourning her loss,

on April 18th 1906, at 5.18 AM,

his house in the Alhambra Valley rattled and shook.

All five chimneys collapsed -

some of the ornamental plaster ceilings fell...

but the damage was superficial.

60 miles away in San Francisco it was not.

The earthquake of 1906 claimed 3,000 lives. Fires raged.

The financial damage was incalculable.

A former mayor of the city pointed out that a more abundant

water supply would have saved both lives and property.

He drew attention too to a water source that would be ideal.

The valley of Hetch Hetchy,

which just happened to lie within

the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

Hetch Hetchy's waterfalls were just like those of Yosemite Valley

fed by melting snow.

So as long as snow fell on the Sierra Nevada,

the supply was inexhaustible.

Muir did everything he could to defend Hetch Hetchy.

He mobilised and motivated the Sierra Club membership,

he wrote articles in which he claimed that it was a second Yosemite,

hardly inferior to the valley he most adored.

Those who wanted the waters of Hetch Hetchy were temple destroyers, Muir insisted.

Devotees of rampant commercialism. Dam Hetch Hetchy?!

As well dam for water tanks, the people's cathedrals and churches,

for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the hand of man.

Roosevelt failed to throw his weight behind Muir's cause.

Instead he gave speeches about the need to ensure that resources

were available for national greatness.

The Sierra Club bombarded politicians with mail.

Congress held three separate sets of hearings on Hetch Hetchy.

The debate dragged on for six years.

But in December of 1913,

the newly elected president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson

signed an act allowing the construction of a dam in Hetch Hetchy.

During the campaign,

Muir's opponents had claimed that he cared for nothing but beauty.

But beauty wasn't the beginning and end of Muir's case.

He wanted America, and its citizens,

to understand that nature wasn't simply theirs to exploit.

He wanted them to understand, and to truly feel,

what he'd once called the long, slow pulse beats of nature.

He wanted them to understand, just as he had ever since his long walk to the Gulf,

that the world was more than just a storehouse for human use.

The loss of Hetch Hetchy was too much to bear.

He was dead of pneumonia within the year.

Muir died a disappointed man, but in fact he'd only lost a battle.

The loss of Hetch Hetchy became a cause celebre.

It brought into being a group of people who would defend America's national parks.

And then, as man's impact on nature became clear,

they sought to defend nature itself.

They became environmentalists.

Thanks to Muir's writings, national parks have spread all around the world.

And over the years, the purpose of national parks

has grown closer and closer to the real core of Muir's vision.

That original insight that first and most powerfully occurred to him

as he walked 1,000 miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

Why should man value himself

as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?

That was what John Muir had learnt and it was what he tried to teach.

It was what he wanted all of us to learn from a valley like this one -

our place in nature.

So although, in the end, he focused on a few dramatic valleys and glaciers,

somehow his vision was always a global one.

When he set out on his 1,000-mile walk

to the Gulf from Indianapolis in 1867,

he wrote in the journal that he always wore on the belt around his waist

the only address that made sense to him -

John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.

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