by Bron Taylor

This excerpt from Bron Taylor’s  book, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future  by Bron Taylor, (University of California Press. 2010) is reprinted here by permission of the author.

As scholar of what he terms “dark green religion,”  Professor Bron Taylor of the University of Florida [ http://www.brontaylor.com ] has pointed out, although neither the term anthropocentrism nor biocentrism had been coined, John Muir clearly had contempt for the former and affinity with the latter:

“Muir heaped scorn, often humorously, on the arrogant human “conceit” that the world was made entirely for man, an idea Muir associated with Christianity. He promoted the sense of kinship he felt with all forms of life by writing about other species as “peoples,” such as of “precious plant peoples” and even “insect peoples.” By portraying them as persons, Muir subtly implied that human persons have obligations to them. Muir likened wildlands to sacred places, sometimes calling them holy and often using the romantic trope “sublime” to express the same idea. This linking of wildness with sacredness led Muir to contrast wild places with civilized and domesticated spaces, viewing humans humans and their domesticated animals as agents of desecration. He evocatively expressed a deep sense of belonging, connection, and loyalty to nature (even at times intimating a greater loyalty to nature than to human society). He spoke regularly of feeling “Nature’s love” from mountains, waterfalls, plants, birds, and other animals, which may explain why he also believed in the healing power of wild places. Muir found a divine harmony in nature that was absent in human civilization and articulated many now-famous and often-quoted aphorisms of metaphysical and ecological interdependence. He also wrote of dramatic, ecstatic experiences in nature that, like much mysticism, erased his perception of individuality and intensified his feelings of being a part of a great cosmic whole, such as when he felt rescued by a mysterious natural force while engaged in dangerous mountaineering. Such experiences gave his life meaning and reinforced his sense of the sacred power of nature, even suggesting an organicist perception that the earth is alive and the idea that interspecies communication is possible. Muir’s enthusiasm about a Yosemite earthquake is telling. He wrote in a letter to Emerson that its rumblings “are the first spoken words that I have heard direct from the tender bosom of mother earth.”  These perceptions can be summed up in what may be his most famous aphorism: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” But equally representative is the next, more animistic line, which is far less often quoted: “One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as fellow mountaineers.”

“Despite the pantheistic and animistic perceptions that are apparent to the alert reader, Muir also seemed to express, or at least to consider, an entirely naturalistic nature religion, one that is reminiscent of Thoreau’s later thinking. Like Thoreau (and Burroughs), Muir understood death not as something to be feared or escaped but rather appreciated as a part of nature’s beautiful cycle.”

* * *

“The essay “Cedar Keys,” written at the end of Muir’s walk to the gulf near where the Suwannee River meets Florida’s Gulf Coast, expressed many of the views for which he would eventually become famous. In what was then a stunning and direct rejection of anthropocentrism he wrote: “The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.” He then lampooned those who believed that the Creator made everything for people, asking, “Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison him?” He continued sardonically: “In the same pleasant plan, whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells.” Then he concluded with his definitive evidence: “venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly diseases of certain parts of the earth prove that whole world was not made for him [man].”

“After citing additional examples to debunk anthropocentric conceit, Muir expressed a contrasting spirituality, one that involved kinship with nonhuman organisms and animistic perceptions regarding many of them. He even suggested an ethics in which one’s sense of self extends affectively beyond one’s own human body in a way that presaged Arne Naess’s notion of the deep, ecological self. Muir’s reflections also anticipated the idea of a sacred “Universe Story,” popularized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries foremost by the Catholic priest and “geologian” Thomas Berry. For example, Muir wrote:

Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit–the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. 

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry “Heresy” on everyone whose sympathies reach a single hair’s breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned. . . . Plants are credited with but dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with? 

This passage also reveals his animistic perception. Another sentence, originally in a section of Muir’s journal that became “Cedar Keys,” suggested not only biocentrism but discomfort with human beings and their societies: “I have precious little sympathy for the myriad bat eyed proprieties of civilized man, and if a war of the races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man I would be tempted to side with the bears.” This passage was abandoned before publication. Perhaps Muir or an editor thought it would be too controversial, that it would distract readers from Muir’s already radical environmental message. The passage displaced humanity from the seat of exclusive moral consideration and would have directly challenged what Muir considered to be hubristic “ecclesiastical fires and blunders.” Indeed, apparently feeling that he had prevailed against such errors, Muir concluded in his published account, “I joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature.” This hints at a naturalistic spirituality and suggests that, for Muir, nature was sufficient as a sacred source.

In an early essay, “Wild Wool,” published in 1875, Muir continued this theme against anthropocentrism:

“To obtain a hearing on behalf of Nature from any other standpoint than that of human use is almost impossible….  No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.

Were it not for the exercise of individualizing cares on the part of Nature, the universe would be felted together like a fleece of tame wool. But we are governed more than we know, and most when we are wildest. Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another — killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities. And it is right that we should thus reciprocally make use of one another, rob, cook, and consume, to the utmost of our healthy abilities and desires. Stars attract one another as they are able, and harmony results. Wild lambs eat as many wild flowers as they can find or desire, and men and wolves eat the lambs to just the same extent.

This consumption of one another in its various modifications is a kind of culture varying with the degree of directness with which it is carried out, but we should be careful not to ascribe to such culture any improving qualities upon those on whom it is brought to bear.” 

Although Muir did not call this ecological cycle of eating and being eaten, killing and being killed, a sacrament (as Gary Snyder did generations later), he did in his own way treat it as a sacred process, even though he understood it to be entirely natural. 

For Muir “divinely common” processes are nevertheless miraculous: “The natural and common is more truly marvelous and mysterious than the so-called supernatural. Indeed, most of the miracles we hear of are infinitely less wonderful than the commonest of natural phenomena, when fairly seen.”

In another suggestive passage, after speaking again about sublime wildness and how nature kept him safe by “a thousand miracles,” Muir wrote of “glorying in the eternal freshness and sufficiency of Nature.”74 These passages are among those that lead me to conclude that Muir may well have left behind any vestige of a supernaturalistic worldview, finding nature itself to be absolutely sufficient for his spiritual and religious needs.

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Notes: 

Excerpts from Bron Taylor are from his book, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future  by Bron Taylor, (University of California Press. 2010) are reprinted here by permission of the author.

Excerpts from John Muir include an excerpt from the chapter “Cedar Keys,” in his book A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), and from his essay “Wild Wool” from 1875.  

The full essay “Wild Wool” by John Muir first appeared in Overland Monthly, April 1875 and was reprinted in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 1. You may read the original Overland Monthly article on the University of the Pacific’s Scholarly Commons.  That version is Muir’s copy of the article that he continued to edit and annotate. Some of these changes were made when re-published later in Steep Trails, others not. In addition, there are at least 4 drafts of this article in the John Muir Papers (not yet online).