Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 190: John Muir, Hetch Hetchy Valley (#145)

John Muir, "Hetch Hetchy Valley" (1912) from John Muir: Nature Writings:

Sometimes the story of conservation reminds me of the joke about the father who is worried about his daughter having sex (it's an old joke and we should probably work on an update) and when it happens, he collapses--with relief. "Thank god the worst has happened," he thinks, "now I can get on with my life." Similarly when I hear that people rejected or fought off plans to dam a river and turn the Hetch Hetchy Valley into a reservoir lake in 1903, '06, '09, et al., I'm pretty much just waiting for them to dam the river. If you win the fight for conservation today, very often you're just going to have to fight it out again tomorrow. (Unless you can change enough people's minds or change the situation. Anti-poaching patrols are good; convincing people that ivory isn't cool is better.)

This piece by John Muir was published in book form in 1912, but some part of it was first published in Sierra Club newsletter form between 1906 and '09, and was part of Muir's (temporarily) successful campaign to prevent San Francisco from damming the valley and creating an artificial lake. And it still shows its newsletter roots, I think: along with a Muir-ish description of the valley's beauty, most of this piece is taken up with the argument against drowning the Hetch Hetchy.

Muir's argument for preserving HH Valley leans curiously on one major point: Hetch Hetchy is comparable to Yosemite. I understand part of the logic of that comparison--which he makes several times in this piece: You all know how great Yosemite is, but did you know there's this other great valley? Of course, the downside to this argument seems apparent to me: If we already got us one good valley-and-falls, what do we need another, smaller one? Sure, Muir and his friends don't see that downside--but with a piece like this, you're not trying to convince the conservationists, but the middle-of-the-road people. (Or you shouldn't be; but this narrow appeal might be explained again by this piece's earlier life in a Sierra Club newsletter.)

(Also, Mr. Muir, I'm not sure you're going to convince people to preserve HH by referring to its "airy-fairy beauty.")

But that to the side, Muir's case is wider than just that. Just as he bangs home the point that HH is a mini-Yosemite, he hammers home how "commercial" and limited this project's benefits would be, pushed by "despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators... with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy...". And that's even before he gets around to comparing them to the money-changers outside the Temple who raise up the Almighty Dollar at the expense of God.

Muir even makes the smart move of ending his piece with something of a refutation to frequently-made arguments for damming the HH. So if you read this, you can take it out with you and engage in debate with your pro-dam family, friends, and representatives.

But over all, the argument here is Muir's usual argument for the intangible: people need access to nature--peace, beauty, serenity. Even the urban poor try to keep some nature around them, says Muir, in their little windowsill gardens. And his final paragraph is a final outpouring of anger and love that should really go on t-shirts or bumper stickers:

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 heart of man.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 171: John Burroughs, The Art of Seeing Things (#135)

John Burroughs, "The Art of Seeing Things" (1908) from American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau:

John Burroughs was a nature writer who was very popular in his day; according to the LoA headnote to his essay, "if John Muir was the craggy champion of the rugged West, John Burroughs is the lower-key bard of the lower-key, lower-elevation eastern mountains, the patron saint of the weekend cottage in the Berkshires." That last bit--"the weekend cottage in the Berkshires"--sure makes Burroughs sound like a dilettante or hand-maiden (spear-bearer?) of the wealthy amateur.

That said, the LoA page is a little more helpful when it puts Burroughs into the context of the 19th-century uncertainty about natural science: something for sentimentalist amateurs or something for scientists? It reminds me of Aldo Leopold's speech on that issues in the 1930s, which I guess just goes to show that Burroughs may have been popular, but wasn't the last word on the matter.

And I can't exactly blame the people who weren't totally convinced by him, if this essay is a fair representation. Not because it's uninteresting, but because Burroughs's essay on observation is a hodge-podge of ideas and notes. There's one real over-arching point here: "love" has to be an essential component of the naturalist, since "What we love to do, that we do well." Or as he puts it at the end of the essay, "You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush." I'll say this for Burroughs: there's lots of quotable moments here.

But that over-arching idea gets expressed in dozens of spokes radiating from that main idea. There's some usual tropes, like reference to reading "the book of nature"; and some Transcendentalist nods with his notion of "eye-beams." (OK, maybe that's not from them exclusively--but it comes right before a mention of Thoreau.) But then there's also talk about how students can be trained for observation, though some of them might be born geniuses. Then there's all the examples of how his love of nature helped him to see things that others missed. And there's comments about how manual training can be good for observations; and a question about whether the environment really affects the development of genius.

Which all kind of orbits around the central point; but don't necessarily reinforce it or build it up.

That said, if, by the end of this week, I don't have a t-shirt with a bird on it and the words, "You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush," then I will have to turn in my card as an owner of cute t-shirts. (Appropriately, the card for that club is also a cute t-shirt.)

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 165: Aldo Leopold, Letters to Estella (#186)

Aldo Leopold, "Letters to Estella" (1917, 1926) from Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation:

Our second and possibly last Aldo Leopold sample (after this one), today's "Story of the Week" is actually two letters from Aldo to his wife Estella: the first is about rescuing a guy who went missing in the Grand Canyon area; the second is about visiting a logging camp. Neither is quite as passionate or pointed as his lecture on how professors are teaching natural history wrong, but both get at something interesting about our relationship to the environment.

For instance, when Aldo goes into the Canyon to rescue a guy, he finds him so weak from dehydration that they have to strap him to the one mule that was able to navigate the windy path. And at the same time, Aldo gives an entire paragraph over to the beauty of the landscape, with the additional note that people who stay up on the top of the Canyon fail to see it. That's barely paraphrased: after rescuing the guy, Aldo's group goes back

to the dudes who sit up here and think they see the Canyon, but don’t.

"Dudes" here probably doesn't mean "guys" but more like "wimp, dandy, city slicker." (See Twain's description of the obsessed narcissistic knights of King Arthur's court as "Iron Dudes" in Connecticut Yankee.) To Aldo, the real way to observe nature is to go deep into it--literally in the case of the Grand Canyon.

For Aldo, the logging camp brings up similar questions, in two ways. On one hand, when he observes the loggers and the trees, he wonders if the loggers can really appreciate the nature all around them. His answer: I don't know, maybe:

By this time it has turned cool and the thrushes are singing deep in the woods that wall the camp. I don’t suppose many of these men hear them, but who knows? The hearers of thrushes may wear hobnails as well as long hair.

That might seem dismissive; but compared to his treatment of the dudes who miss the Grand Canyon, it's pretty generous.

Aldo also notes how the city slicker doesn't get this experience of nature--or in this case, the experience of natural resources being harvested: 

The city man who buys a truckload of lumber has no idea of what goes into it.

City man, dudes, loggers, long hairs--Aldo Leopold knows that the future of American conservancy depends on the Americans who either experience it and can understand its beauty; or who never see it for what it really is.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 150: Berton Roueché, The Fog (#121)

Berton Roueché, "The Fog" (1950) from American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau:

I know Berton Roo Rouch Roueché from his medical writing, the popular nonfiction medical mystery stories that he wrote for the New Yorker and elsewhere. So it's not surprising to find that this entry in the American Earth anthology is something of a cross-over: a story (written for the New Yorker, natch) about an environmental anomaly that lead to a widespread medical issue.

The story is: in 1948, in Donora, PA, the usual air pollution from the factories didn't dissipate, largely thanks to an air inversion (according to the studies made soon after). And the air got so bad that 20 people died in three days, while many died or suffered from complications arising from that toxic fog.

Though Roueché ends with the somewhat unsatisfying reports on the event; and though the framing of the story tells us up front what this story is about--it's about a killer fog, right?; Roueché still manages to keep interest by giving us the POV of various people who are on the ground there--and who keep trying to light cigarettes or cigars! From our vantage point, that seems crazy, but from the POV of people who are facing something that they don't know about, well, of course they need something to relax. So that's what I'm taking away here from technique: the multi-POV way that Roueché keeps us embedded in these people's stories while also giving us a broader view.

Random thought: The opening, which pays attention to the Donoran landscape, really reminds me of the war reporting from the Civil Was (and others).