General thoughts on Muir's My first summer in the Sierra

I started reading My first Summer in the Sierra when I happened to be at a park just beneath the Burbank foothills. As Muir was describing his natural setting, I couldn’t help feeling more in tuned to my environment. His narrative makes numerous connections with nature and the sublime, but what really caught my eye was the way he describes the Native Americans. He initially explains that the natives have lived for centuries with scarcely hurting Nature “hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats...” (38). He seems to admire the way they have preserved their land without inflicting permanent damage. He then compares the Native Americans’ treatment of the landscape with the Anglo-Americans who have “imprisoned [the natural world] in iron pipes to strike and wash away hills and miles of the skin of the mountain’s face, riddling, stripping every gold gully and flat” (38). Muir expresses his disappointment with how white Americans have in a “few feverish” years imposed irreversible damage to the earth without giving it a second thought. When I first read these two particular passages, I didn’t pick up on any racial undertones. In fact, I thought it was quite refreshing to read positive remarks being made toward our indigenous neighbors. It wasn’t until I finished reading the next few pages that I thought I might have over estimated Mr. Muir. As soon as he praises them for their respect for Nature, he then precedes to describe an old native woman dressed in rags as being “far from clean” (40). He says that “In every way she seemed sadly unlike Nature’s neat well-dressed animals, though living like them on the bounty of the wilderness” (40). I was honestly surprised and bothered by these remarks and other racial statements he makes throughout the text. On one hand, he applauds them for maintaining the natural order of things, but on the other hand he is perfectly comfortable with calling them savages and highlighting their so-called inadequacies; I wasn’t sure what to make of this. 

The other thing that I thought was interesting was how Muir associates music with Nature and the sublime. He makes many references to birds, waterfalls, and streams singing softly to him. He also discusses the natural setting as if it is alive and connected to him. Toward the end of his journey, he articulates that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (96). This comment immediately reminded me of Neil Evernden’s  “Beyond Ecology” where Evernden argues that since we are intermingled with natural world, we need to reconsider how we contend with Nature. I think this idea of intermingling or interconnectedness provide a nuanced way of examining our relationship with Nature, and it seems that Muir was also interested in exploring these very same ideas.