by Tom Kruzen
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Many Sierra Club members as well as its detractors forget that the Club was founded a century ago from the deep wellspring of rural values of its progenitof — John Muir. Born in Dunbar, Scotland in 1838 and the son of a preacher/farmer, John Muir once recalled: “When I was a boy in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately, around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness…with red blooded playmates, wild as myself, I loved to wander in the fields, to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low.”
The family later moved to the wilds of Wisconsin for religious freedom and cheap land. Years of hard work and keen observation on the family farm in Wisconsin showed Muir the interconnectedness of the web of life. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Having lived in rural Iowa in the 1970’s, I found this same deep understanding of nature alive and well. It was not uncommon for my farmer-employer/friend and mentor, Lester Haferbier to take a break during the frenetic planting or harvest times and wander into the “back 40” away from all the bustle to sit in wait of an eagle feeding her young or to pick a gallon of blackberries or to just stand on a bluff soaking up the beauty of it all. The ebb and flow of the natural world comes easy to people who toil with the earth. Farmers whose lives depend on living natural systems learn very quickly to respect the earth and understand its spirit. They understand on many levels literally who and what butters their bread … and where the bread and butter come from. Farmers engage in the act of preservation from the get-go. They put up hay and save seed. Farmers’ wives preserve the bounty from the garden and from wild-collected fruits and nuts. Very often the entire family was totally engaged in these activities. The abundance of June, July and August translated in a very real way to winter survival and pleasant surprises of a January blackberry cobbler.
For Muir it was no giant leap then to see the intrinsic value of a place like Yosemite or Hetch Hetchy. Self-reliance and resourcefulness were qualities found in family farm life. Often miles from the nearest hardware store or repair shop, farmers often substitute something that works as well as the original. It was resourcefulness that bound Muir with such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Roosevelt to help save America’s wild treasures. Muir created the Sierra Club to weld an ever industrialized and alienated public to the spiritual essence of unfettered places.
John Muir’s boyhood wonder and farm-bred practicum later found fulfillment and further challenges in the grandeur of the Sierra Nevada, Alaska and the Grand Canyon. It is why today the Sierra Club engages in trying to save the last best wild places like Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the very life-sustaining elements of the planet — water and air. It is also why the Sierra Club today often finds close allies in the traditional farming communities. John Muir’s great contribution to wilderness preservation was to successfully promote the idea that wilderness had spiritual as well as economic value. We find ourselves heading toward doom and annihilation because we have allowed the economic interest in nature to take precedent and overpower its spiritual essence. It would do us well to remember these Muir words: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Modern urban industrialists with their CAFOs and their Monsanto-bred “terminator seeds” stand in stark contrast to traditional rural values. Twisting nature into their image, they make it virtually impossible for family farmers to save seeds, operate without poisons or even to survive as independent businessmen. Corporate industrialism, masquerading as farming, planting itself in the rural landscape today destroys, diminishes and demeans all that traditional family agriculture has stood for. In the words of present day Kentucky farmer/conservationist, Wendell Berry: “Somehow we have lost or discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the Earth and the human capacity to use it well. Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.” Over a century later I still hear John Muir talking.