the john muir exhibit - press_releases - the pathless way
by Michael P. Cohen
(
from the book's dust jacket
)
The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness
by Michael P. Cohen
1984
University of Wisconsin Press.
Madison
In this powerful study, Michael Cohen captures as
never before the complex consciousness, vision, and
legacy of the pioneering environmentalist John Muir.
More than just another biography, Cohen's analysis
assumes the shape of a spiritual journey that traces
Muir's developing thought, his enlightenment in the
Sierra Mountains, and his attempt to translate
transcendental convictions into effective public writing
and political strategy. Perhaps most important, Cohen
conveys the heart of Muir's journey -- the wilderness
experience -- with an immediacy, eloquence, and personal
understanding that reflect Cohen's own years in the
Sierra. Anyone interested in environmental studies, in
American history and literature , or in the future of our
natural heritage will be drawn by the credible, human,
questing Muir and the very bracing flavor of this
wilderness odyssey, evoked here by one of his own -- a
twentieth-century mountaineer and literary craftsman.
In tracing Muir's spiritual and intellectual evolution
Cohen examines not only published texts but the writer's
notebooks, drafts, and letters. The path leads from a
Presbyterian childhood and Muir's early years as an
inventor of machines to his pivotal enlightenment in the
Sierra. It was that enlightenment, Cohen argues, that
represents both the climax of Muir's intensely personal
search for self-knowledge and the enduring foundation of
his ecological consciousness.
Giving himself up to the experience of wilderness
with all the discipline and asceticism of a religious
pilgrim, exuberantly immersed in nature's flow of sun,
rain, wind, flood, and blizzard, Muir came to embody the
very meaning of his vision in the mountains of
California
.
Muir sought and found in wilderness the source of
humanity's spiritual health and wholeness. Only by
submerging oneself in nature's unified, eternal, and
always changing landscape could men and women
appreciate the process of creation and perceive their
own part in it.
Ultimately, Cohen stresses, this ecological
consciousness would generate an ecological conscience.
It was no longer enough for Muir to individually test and
celebrate his enlightenment in the wild. His vision, he
now felt, must lead to concrete action, and the result
was a protracted campaign that stressed the ecological
education of the American public, government protection
of natural resources, the establishment of National
Parks, and the encouragement of tourism. If, as Cohen
suggests, these public positions sometimes compromised
Muir's early principles, the larger vision subsisted. It
was his baptism in the Sierra "contemplating the lace-
like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains"
that would remain, to the end, the inviolable, cherished,
and consuming core of his life and thought. By clarifying
the meaning and importance of that central
consciousness, Cohen illuminates not only Muir but his
fledgling movement, and the magnetism of his beloved
mountains.
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