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On Thursday March 4, 2004, Dr. Donald Worster,
author of more than half a dozen books on the topic of environmental
history, presented a lecture at the Walden Woods Project's Thoreau
Institute entitled John Muir and the American Passion for Nature.
In his
talk, based on a current book project underway, Dr. Worster
described John Muir's ecological outlook evolving over the course of
his lifetime from a staunch, paganistic egalitarianism to a
romantic, detached nostalgia. He suggested that Muir followed
a fairly common trajectory for a late nineteenth century social
climber, embracing an ambitious acquisitive ethos and elite politics
such that by the end of his life he could dictate pieces lamenting
the loss of bird habitat in his native Wisconsin while ignoring the
ecological destruction going on outside his very window in the
Klamath Basin. This talk was video-taped for our archives and can be
viewed in the reading room of the
Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods. |
