Exuberance: The Passion for Life Read Online Free Page A

to which Muir’s contagious enthusiasm for Yosemite and the sequoia groves influenced Roosevelt’s subsequent actions. Roosevelt was already committed to the idea of conservation and had been for many years, but there is no doubt that he feltan additional sense of urgency after hiking with Muir. Immediately following his trip to Yosemite, Roosevelt delivered what was to become one of his most famous speeches. “I have just come from a four days’ rest in Yosemite,” he said to a gathering of people in Sacramento. “I want [the trees] preserved because they are the only things of their kind in the world. Lying out at night under those giant sequoias was lying in a temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect could by any possibility build, and I hope for the preservation of the groves of giant trees simply because it would be a shame to our civilization to let them disappear. They are monuments in themselves.” He talked about the need to conserve American forest lands and then closed with a plea for the rights of future generations: “I ask that your marvelous natural resources be handed on unimpaired to your posterity. We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”
    Muir expressed the same desire differently. “Any fool candestroy trees,” he wrote. “They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed.… It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods—trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, levelling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools—only [the government] can do that.”
    Muir knew in his marrow thatwilderness was a necessity, that “going to the mountains is going home.” It was scripture: in wilderness “lies the hope of the world.” To save nature was to save oneself. “The galling harness of civilization drops off,” he said, “and the wounds heal ere we are aware.”
    John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt were exuberant men. Infectiously enthusiastic, stupendously energetic, they left the country a wilder and more beautiful place because of their vision and action. Both registered the mountains and lands so keenly that they could not but act with urgency when the wilderness was threatened. Their receptive natures allowed them to feel and see that which was essential in the lands, that which could not be gotten elsewhere. Neither was capable of doing nothing when there was much to be done. Their joy in the wild was contagious to those around them. Both were persuasive by temperament and able to convince others of what they felt to be a moral imperative. Conservation was in their blood, not just in their intellect. It was elemental.
    For Muir, it was a single, sustained, and consistent life’s passion to preserve the wilderness. For Roosevelt, there would be many other crusades to engage his energies over a long and diverse politicallife. But because Roosevelt was a politician, because he had so many other passions and commitments, he was in a wider arena, with a more powerful scope, and therefore better able to act on behalf of the lands they cherished in common. “All of us who give service, and stand ready for sacrifice, are the torch-bearers,” wrote Roosevelt. “We run with the torches until we fall, content if we can pass them to the hands of the other runners.… These are the torch-bearers; these are they who have dared the Great Adventure.”
    John Muir spoke of a more inward journey: “I only went out for a walk,” he wrote, “and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

CHAPTER TWO
     

“This Wonderful