Reconnecting With John Muir

Download or read book Reconnecting with John Muir written by Terry Gifford and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advancing for the first time the concept of "post-pastoral practice," Reconnecting with John Muir springs from Terry Gifford's understanding of the great naturalist as an exemplar of integrated, environmentally conscious knowing and writing. Just as the discourses of science and the arts were closer in Muir's day--in part, arguably, because of Muir--it is time we learned from ecology to recognize how integrated our own lives are as readers, students, scholars, teachers, and writers. When we defy the institutional separations, purposely straying from narrow career tracks, the activities of reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing can inform each other in a holistic "post-pastoral" professional practice. Healing the separations of culture and nature represents the next way forward from the current crossroads in the now established field of ecocriticism. The mountain environment provides a common ground for the diverse modes of engagement and mediation Gifford discusses. By attempting to understand the meaning of Muir's assertion that "going to the mountains is going home," Gifford points us toward a practice of integrated reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing that is adequate to our environmental crisis.

Download or read book Henry Thoreau and John Muir Among the Native Americans written by Richard F. Fleck and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No two persons in the United States have written with as much passion and power about the bond between human beings and the natural world as Thoreau of WALDEN and Muir of MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA. For both, Native Americans best exemplified the innate need of the human spirit to merge with the primal wilderness. This is the first book to treat together and in depth these two great students of our natural America to explore Native American influence on the development not only of their—but America’s—natural philosophies and environmental awareness.

Download or read book The Contemplative John Muir written by Stephen Hatch and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Muir is best known for his work in preserving the great natural areas of America. What is not commonly known is that he was also a great contemplative thinker - a sort of "wilderness mystic" - one who experienced union with the Divine through contact with the great natural areas of the Western United States. Muir's preservation efforts were motivated in large part by his experience of the spiritual dimension of Nature. It was Muir's earthy mysticism that motivated him to work so diligently for the preservation of wild places, which he viewed as "God's First Temples." This book is a sort of "bible" of Muir quotations related to a vibrant and ecstatic spirituality of Nature. It includes a new selection of never-before published selections from original journals contained in the John Muir Papers, as well as passages from his published works. Anyone interested in experiencing a deeper communion with Nature will find this book invaluable.

Download or read book Selected Writings of John Muir written by John Muir and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of the seminal writings of America's first naturalist and the founder of the modern conservation movement. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY ORIGINAL. This volume of John Muir's selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm, where his interest in nature was first piqued; in The Mountains of California, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska, we follow him on long journeys into stunning mountain ranges and valleys, where he records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciers on landscape formation. These four full-length works--along with a selection of important essays--helped galvanize American naturalists, and led to the founding of the Sierra Club and several national parks. In these pages, written with meticulous thoroughness and an impassioned lyricism, we witness Muir's awakening to the incredible beauty of our planet, and the honing of an eye turned as acutely toward the scientific as the spiritual.

Download or read book Alaska Days with John Muir written by Samuel Hall Young and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Hall Young, a Presbyterian clergyman, met John Muir when the great naturalist's steamboat docked at Fort Wrangell, in southeastern Alaska, where Young was a missionary to the Stickeen Indians. In Alaska Days with John Muir he describes this 1879 meeting: "A hearty grip of the hand and we seemed to coalesce in a friendship which, to me at least, has been one of the very best things in a life full of blessings." This book, first published in 1915, describes two journeys of discovery taken in company with Muir in 1879 and 1880. Despite the pleas of his missionary colleagues that he not risk life and limb with "that wild Muir," Young accompanied Muir in the exploration of Glacier Bay. Upon Muir's return to Alaska in 1880, they traveled together and mapped the inside route to Sitka. Young describes Muir's ability to "slide" up glaciers, the broad Scotch he used when he was enjoying himself, and his natural affinity for Indian wisdom and theistic religion. From the gripping account of their near?disastrous ascent of Glenora Peak to Young's perspective on Muir's famous dog story "Stickeen," Alaska Days is an engaging record of a friendship grounded in the shared wonders of Alaska's wild landscapes.

Download or read book John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire written by Kim Heacox and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dual biography of two of the most compelling elements in the narrative of wild America, John Muir and Alaska. John Muir was a fascinating man who was many things: inventor, scientist, revolutionary, druid (a modern day Celtic priest), husband, son, father and friend, and a shining son of the Scottish Enlightenment -- both in temperament and intellect. Kim Heacox, author of The Only Kayak, bring us a story that evolves as Muir’s life did, from one of outdoor adventure into one of ecological guardianship---Muir went from impassioned author to leading activist. The book is not just an engaging and dramatic profile of Muir, but an expose on glaciers, and their importance in the world today. Muir shows us how one person changed America, helped it embrace its wilderness, and in turn, gave us a better world. December 2014 will mark the 100th anniversary of Muir’s death. Muir died of a broken heart, some say, when Congress voted to approve the building of Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park. Perhaps in the greatest piece of environmental symbolism in the U.S. in a long time, on the California ballot this November is a measure to dismantle the Hetch Hetchy Dam. Muir’s legacy is that he reordered our priorities and contributed to a new scientific revolution that was picked up a generation later by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, and is championed today by influential writers like E.O. Wilson and Jared Diamond. Heacox will take us into how Muir changed our world, advanced the science of glaciology and popularized geology. How he got people out there. How he gave America a new vision of Alaska, and of itself.

Download or read book Transatlantic Literary Ecologies written by Kevin Hutchings and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening a dialogue between ecocriticism and transatlantic studies, this collection shows how the two fields inform, complement, and complicate each other. The editors situate the volume in its critical contexts by providing a detailed literary and historical overview of nineteenth-century transatlantic socioenvironmental issues involving such topics as the contemporary fur and timber trades, colonialism and agricultural "improvement," literary discourses on conservation, and the consequences of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and urban environmental activism. The chapters move from the broad to the particular, offering insights into Romanticism’s transatlantic discourses on nature and culture, examining British Victorian representations of nature in light of their reception by American writers and readers, providing in-depth analyses of literary forms such as the adventure novel, travel narratives, and theological and scientific writings, and bringing transatlantic and ecocritical perspectives to bear on classic works of nineteenth-century American literature. By opening a critical dialogue between these two vital areas of scholarship, Transatlantic Literary Ecologies demonstrates some of the key ways in which Western environmental consciousness and associated literary practices arose in the context of transatlantic literary and cultural exchanges during the long nineteenth century.