Monoscapes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 42

he lived until his death in 1914, Muir's writings and campaigns gave rise
to the world's first national parks. He helped to found the Sierra Club in
1892, an environmental movement with 600,000 members today. Many
commentators talk at length about the wilderness Muir frequented. In
1869, he walked the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and lived rough for five
years to study the flora, fauna and geology. Muir accompanied shepherds
with their flock of several thousand sheep from the foothills to the high
mountains, including the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers
and the spectacular waterfalls of Yosemite Creek. He called Yosemite a
'park valley', and celebrated nature's creativity: 'what pains are taken to help this
wilderness in health. . . How fine Nature's methods! How deeply with beauty is beauty
overlaid' . 34
Yet, this is a landscape shaped by humans, and in particular by the
Ahwahneechee, who created the meadows of Yosemite through fire
clearances. 35 Muir was aware of the effects of people on the landscape -
he carefully documented the actions of the shepherds and local Native
Americans whom he met on the way. But this awareness is lost on many
commentators, who themselves see only untouched wilderness through
Muir's eyes. He encountered groves of Sabine pines, the nuts of which,
he was told by a shepherd, were gathered by the 'Digger Indians' for food.
These groves were not there by accident; they had been sustained and
protected by the gatherers. Muir observed women collecting wild lupin,
saxifrage and roots, and recorded a variety of other species as valuable food
sources, including beaked hazel nuts and acorns, squirrels and rabbits,
berries, grasshoppers, black ants, wasps, bee larvae, and many other 'starchy
roots, seeds and bark in abundance' . At one stage, in early July, Muir and his
colleagues ran out of food, apart from mutton. Awaiting supplies amidst
gnawing hunger, Muir lamented the fact that they could not find food
in this rich landscape: 'Like the Indians, we ought to know how to get the starch out
of fern and saxifrage stalks, lily bulbs, pine bark etc. Our education has been sadly neglected
for many generations.'
Muir noted the soft touch of the Native Americans on the landscape:
How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows, probably a
great many. . . and it seems strange that heavier marks have not been made. Indians
walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels. . . How
different are most of those of the white man, especially on the lower gold region -
roads blasted in the solid rock, wild streams dammed and tamed and turned out of
their channels.
He also noted that the Native Americans created 'enchanting monuments. . .
wrought in the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds'. It would,